I find it funny and revealing that many are offended at the idea of striving for perfection. In many spiritual circles it's not PC. Why shouldn’t it be PC? Because we think our all-inclusive tolerance and self-proclaimed identification with All That Is or some Deity, or divine state issues from a sustainable perspective. The flip side of that coin is the tendency to judge what we do not understand.
Striving for perfection seems the only social activism.
All-inclusive tolerance, free from judgment, but not from discriminative awareness, is a result of striving for perfection, and when it’s not we will eventually hit a wall of internal contradiction: where the BS can be smelled from afar.
If I am trying to reach a destination and am told by the well-charted map or GPS or expert experience of another to go east and instead ignore those and go west and lose my way, maybe some time there will be a chance that I arrive at my destination, but I could have arrived more easily had I been more conscious, and had I lacked the clumsy notion that I needed to reinvent the wheel. Importantly, however, that's not to say there's no room for better and more efficient wheels: in any case I have to be completely honest with myself, since maybe the map does not show certain routes, nor the GPS certain roadblocks.
Take a person who flies off the handle easily, with physical, verbal, and mental aggression, making himself and others miserable. We could blithely offer that he and his hissy fits are part of All That Is, the Guru, the Mystery, the Deity, etc. But the fact remains that most of us would rather not be yelled at or hit or denied rights and would prefer to be with people who have a grip on their behavior.
The angry person who wants to change does not necessarily wake up one day free of the habit of flying off the handle, though the possibility for that is not precluded either. Gradual and sudden enlightenment are mutually supportive. You don’t choose one or the other. That’s like choosing to breathe this air but not that air over there. Focusing on the gradual approach makes the sudden a possibility. If the sudden happens without having trained in the gradual and evidenced in behavior, be careful: it's just a step on a journey that has not ended. And as long has our behavior remains untransformed over time, it may be that our approach needs to be examined.
The person with a tendency toward temper tantrums, having become alienated from peace and joy and decidedly not liking that experience, starts a process, and that process might include a major shift to another state of consciousness, which might also entail conscious striving: this hour, I will not let anger control my body or speech. Once he does that, he slowly comes to realize that not getting angry seems to have something to do with others sticking around, with him and others experiencing great well-being. That is what striving for perfection entails.
If it’s not PC to be challenged at more than one level of our being, to think and consider our situations deeply rather than darting straight to the facile abstraction of the Mystery, or of I Am That, or any number of other platitudes including Karma (about which we know almost nothing) or of high and pure self-identification, why would we have evolved brains that can be distinguished by their capacity for inquiry?
Without this process of inquiry, we may still be using clubs and stones as our main household appliances. This is one of the reasons there is such heavy emphasis on the Lamrim, or graduated Stages of the Path in Tibetan Buddhism before safely and properly embarking on the Vajrayana. But it's too bad the "lesser vehicle" practices, such as the four foundations of mindfulness, whose lineages were not fully propagated in the west, have not been particularly encouraged by many teachers as legitimate and possibly vital precursors to making headway with the practices of the Lamrim, to say nothing of the Vajrayana.
In reading the Pali suttas, we see the commitment the Buddha had to continuous inquiry. He resisted the impulse to systematize and prescribe, which is why many people don't take certain gradual approaches seriously: such approaches have become highly systematized and prescriptive. Prescriptions seem often to be less compelling than inspiring stories, just as poetry is sometimes more compelling and internally transforming than sastric analysis, fine reasoning, and memorized lists. All may be needed at particular stages of development, but relying on any one approach exclusively will reveal its limitations for an individual over time.
If by gradual approach or Stages of the Path we are encouraged to focus on a single part of a vast and detailed outline and its commentaries, such as: today I may die, we might have enough room to make deep contact with that truth within our lived experience. Of course, extensive and detailed teachings are important seeds, and we are unendingly grateful for precious teachings, but anyone will tell you that if you plant your seeds in someone's winter, so to speak, they are as good as stones scattered on cement.
How can I be transformed by airy directives that are often entirely divorced from my moment to moment experience, and which have less power than even their overuse to effect changes in my unexamined habitual behaviors, which I now coat with a veneer of divine self-identification? The danger is clear. Mark how conceptual understandings rarely alter our behavior as such. Why is that? I maintain, where mindfulness remains undeveloped so will the capacity for actual transformation through more esoteric practices, that can prop up and further our as yet undismantled self-importance.
We can choose to complacently revel in our new found status of I Am That (Deity, etc) which, authentic though it may feel in that charged and blissful moment outside the context of our day to day lives, but rest assured if we don't have the foundation of mindfulness anything might set us off and turn our mantrically charged energy into a mine field for ourselves and others.
